Charlotte Corday

Charlotte Corday (27 July 1768-17 July 1793) was a minor French noblewoman who was the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat.

Biography
Charlotte Corday was born in Normandy, Kingdom of France on 27 July 1768 to a minor noble family. She had sympathies with the Girondists during the times of the French Revolution and Reign of Terror, which saw the radical Jacobin Club execute thousands of people (by 1793, every day was an execution day). When pamphleteer Jean-Paul Marat supported the killing of the Girondist leadership, she bought a knife from Mathieu Pinson in the Sorbonne district of Paris, where Marat lived in a medicinal bath. Corday wrote a list of Girondist names and entered Marat's home, supposedly to rat out her fellow Girondists. However, she stabbed him in the chest with a kitchen knife and escaped.

Corday was tried for the murder of Marat and was executed by guillotine on 17 July 1793. When her head was mounted on a pike, still dying from lack of blood and air, a man named LeGros slapped her face, and she made a face of indignation before her head lost all blood and air and died. LeGros was imprisoned for three months for this outburst. Corday remains either a heroine or an enemy of the revolution.